


And The Gang of Sentient Toys

by Hedgehog-o-Brien (Roshwen)



Category: Leverage, The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Case Fic Of Sorts, Gen, Humor, No stuffed animals were harmed in the writing of this fic, mostly self indulgent, slight crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 19:51:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18644956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roshwen/pseuds/Hedgehog-o-Brien
Summary: Eliot heaved a deep breath, scrubbed his eyes and sat back. ‘But what it sounded to me, you know. Is that you just said that your sister’s toys, the toyswe got her, have come alive.’‘Yeah.’‘Toys can’t come alive, sweetheart.’‘I know.’ Slurp. ‘But these ones have.’ Slurp. ‘And I think they’re up to something.’ Slurp. ‘This is the best juice ever.’ Slurp.‘I know. I’ll give you a bottle to take home if you want. And what do you mean they’re up to something?’Or: when her baby sister DeeDee comes home from the hospital with a mountain of toys, Elvira Alvarez could not be happier. Until the whispers start, and she decides she might need some help of her own...





	And The Gang of Sentient Toys

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [The Oink Oink Inc. Job](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18561118). Best to read that one first, or you will be confused about the first 1000 words or so.
> 
> Also, this fic is _massively_ self indulgent, meaning that those sentient toys? Are the toys from my childhood. And yes, they were definitely alive at some point and you cannot convince me otherwise. 
> 
> For clarity's sake: Bongo is a gorilla. Igor is either a racoon or a lemur, we've never figured that one out. Lemur is, a lemur. Mr. Raven and Purple Bird are also pretty self-explanatory and Archibald is a big fat orange bastard. 
> 
> If I can find one, I'll post a picture of this gang below. But for now, enjoy!

‘Missus Ford?’

Parker whipped around. The Brewpub was empty, as it was supposed to be: it was still an hour before lunch time and even though the door was unlocked, all the chairs were still upturned and there was absolutely no indication that customers where welcome yet.

‘Ehm. Missus Ford?’ came the voice again. It came from the door and now that Parker looked closer, she could see the small form stepping forward. ‘Are you. Are you missus Ford? The one that helped DeeDee?’

Parker tensed. Burglars and thugs she could have dealt with, easily. Clients were harder, and especially if they seemed to be about ten years old. Ten years old and looking dead serious, with big dark eyes set in a narrow face, chin set in a way that told Parker clearly that a pat on the head and a ‘you want to see a shiny’ was not going to work.

‘I… am missus Ford, yeah,’ she said slowly. ‘Just hang on a minute, okay? Eliot! _Eliot!_ ’

\---

 Eliot blinked. ‘You… wanna run that by me again, sweetheart?’

Elvira Alvarez, sitting in the farthest booth away from the windows (the Client Booth, as Hardison had dubbed it) and slurping from a mango-pineapple-orange smoothie the size of her head, stared back. ‘I just told you. I don’t wanna tell it again.’

‘Yeah, alright.’ Eliot heaved a deep breath, scrubbed his eyes and sat back. ‘But what it sounded to me, you know. Is that you just said that your sister’s toys, the toys _we got her,_ have come alive.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Toys can’t come alive, sweetheart.’

‘I know.’ Slurp. ‘But these ones have.’ Slurp. ‘And I think they’re up to something.’ Slurp. ‘This is the best juice ever.’ Slurp.

‘I know. I’ll give you a bottle to take home if you want. And what do you mean they’re up to something?’

Elvira put down the smoothie and started digging around in the bright yellow backpack she had put on the bench next to her. After rummaging around for about half a minute, she produced a pink bedazzled smart phone, tapped a couple of buttons and handed it to Eliot, who took it gingerly. ‘What’s this?’

‘I took a picture.’

‘Right.’ Eliot nodded appreciatively. ‘Smart.’

Then he actually looked at the picture on the screen. ‘What the he… _heck?’_

 ‘See?’ Elvira picked up the smoothie again and gave a self-satisfied slurp. ‘That’s weird, isn’t it?’

‘I’m gonna be honest with ya, darling,’ Eliot sighed, already getting his own phone out of his pocket. ‘I think we’re gonna need some reinforcements for this. Hey, Jakie? You got any plans today?’

\---

‘Wow. You look like the same person, only you’ve got short hair and you’ve got long hair.’

‘Yeah, we get that a lot. Now, could you please tell Jake what you’ve told me? Start with the whispers.’

\---

Fortified with enough juice to drown a small village and a plate of PB and J sandwiches to boot, Elvira told her story. It had started about six months ago, two nights after her baby sister had come home from the hospital. DeeDee had come home, still bandaged all over but smiling all the same. Elvira had been so happy that she hadn’t even been all that jealous about all the stuffed (non-exploding) toys DeeDee brought home with her. Instead she had hugged her baby sister as tight as she dared while trying not to cry, and her mother and father had brought all the toys upstairs and arranged them in a nice big pile in DeeDee’s room and that had been that.

Until Elvira went to bed that night, and the whispers began.

At first she thought it was just a dream. But weird dreams usually only happen once or twice, and the whispers from DeeDee’s room had been coming back for months now. And Elvira would have been the first to admit that she had an active imagination, even for a nine-year-old, but even she would not have come up with this:

_‘Hey… hey, psssst. Igor. Hey.’_

_‘What?’_

_‘You think she’s asleep yet?’_

_‘’Course they are. Li’l one conked out as soon as she got into bed. Let’s go, get the others.’_

_‘Hey. Hey, Lemur. Archibald, wake up.’_

_‘Huh?’_

_‘What?’_

_‘Guys, come on. Time to get moving.’_

After that, it would usually take a while before everybody woke up, whoever _everybody_ was. Then there were more whispers, bits of conversation and muted arguments (mostly concerning leadership, as far as Elvira could tell. Two of the whispering voices seemed to disagree _very strongly_ about which one of them was in charge) followed by scuffling, the sound of a number of tiny feet scattering across the hallway, and then, finally, silence.

‘And then they’ll always come back in the morning,’ Elvira finished. She sipped the dregs out of the smoothie, not looking Eliot or Jake in the eye now that her story was out there in all its weirdness. ‘I always… I always hope they stay gone, but they always come back. And then the next night, it all happens again.’

‘And they go to…’ Jake asked, picking up the pink phone and squinting at the tiny image. ‘Is that a storage shed? In your backyard?’

Elvira nodded. ‘It’s for daddy fishing gear. But he hasn’t gone fishing in like, forever. So no one ever comes in there anymore. I wanted to go look, but it’s really dark in there and I think there’s spiders too, so I didn’t.’

‘Good call,’ Eliot said, mouth quirking into a smile. ‘Don’t want spiders in your hair, now, do you?’

Elvira glared. Jake jabbed an elbow into his brother’s side to shut him up. ‘Alright. So we’ve got… a gang of stuffed toys. Waking up in the middle of the night. And taking off to do _something_ in the family’s abandoned storage shed, we don’t know what but they’ve been doing it for six months now.’

Eliot grinned. ‘Sounds like your kind of gig, Jakie.’

‘Sure,’ Jake said with a shrug. ‘’S not like the world’s exploding today, so why not. Elvira, darling, could you give me that phone again for one sec?’

\---

‘What _are_ those?’ Ezekiel asked, leaning over Jacob’s shoulder to get a better look at the laptop screen. ‘Also, how many of those things are there?’

‘Elvira thinks there’s six of them,’ Jacob replied. He pointed at the different shapes in the picture, forming a nice little conga line across the grass of the Alvarez’ back yard. ‘One, two, three… yeah, that’s six alright. There’s the gorilla, two lemurs…’

‘I think that one’s a raccoon, mate.’

‘Could be. No tail, so, who knows. Then there’s the raven, the purple one that looks like a parrot on crack and the unholy orange abomination that looks like a teddy bear after some kind of tragic nuclear accident. According to Elvira, they take off every night around eleven and they come back every morning at six, right before everybody wakes up. No one in the house seems to have noticed yet, which is… weird.’

Ezekiel hummed. ‘And she hasn’t told, you know. Her parents?’

Jacob gave him a look and put on a falsetto voice. ‘Mommy, I think DeeDee’s toys are alive and are hatching some kind of plot in the shed in the back yard. Could you please go look?’

‘Yeah, alright. Fair enough.’ Ezekiel sat back. ‘Alright. I’m game to go toy wrangling. Anybody home tonight?’

Jacob grinned. ‘Eliot’s gonna take care of that.’

\---

Later that afternoon, Mrs. Alvarez got a phone call about a minor gas leak down the street. It wasn’t dangerous, per se, but since the family had already had their share of fire-related tragedy, they did not want to take any chances and chose to spend the night in a hotel instead until the gas company could come and fix the problem the next day.

These things happen.

\---

At 10.55pm that night, the Alvarez house was dark and quiet as could be. Nothing moved; nothing made a sound. For five whole minutes, the place was completely at peace, and then:

‘Okay guys, let’s go! Can someone wake up Archibald and make sure he gets through the door without breaking anything? Mr. Raven, perhaps? OK, thank you, then we’re good. Come on!’

There was a bit of scuffling and the door to DeeDee Alvarez’ room cracked open. A dark snout, about five inches above the ground, peeked around the edge. ‘All clear!’

The door opened a little further and four dark shapes, none of them over six inches tall, darted across the hallway towards the staircase. Then the door opened _a lot_ further and two more shapes emerged, one bird-like and one massive, round and at least twice the size of the others. It lumbered across the threshold, obviously still half-asleep if the huge cracking yawn it let out was anything to go by.

‘Archibald, come on!’ one of the others yelled from the top of the stairs. ‘We’ve gotta… oh _shit!’_

DeeDee’s door slammed shut. The light in the hallway clicked on, bathing the cluster of toys on the top of the stairs in a harsh yellow light.

‘Abort mission! _Abort mission!’_

‘What’s going on?’

_‘Abort mission!’_

‘I thought they left! Igor, _you said they left!’_

_‘Abort mission!’_

_‘Archibald will you stop saying abort mission!’_

_‘Abort mission!’_

_‘What’s going on?’_

‘If I may,’ a slightly calmer voice managed to make itself known over the squabbling of squeaky voices, ‘I believe there’s two gentlemen standing over there. Hello, sirs?’

‘Hi,’ Ezekiel said, then immediately went ‘ _hey’_ as both the gorilla and the possibly-a-lemur-might-be-a-raccoon charged at him, bellowing in unrighteous fury. Unfortunately, being stuffed toys, they did not do much damage; all they managed to do was headbutt his shins and flail around with their stubby arms, yelling incoherently while Ezekiel stood there, trying and failing not to laugh.

‘Alright, that’s enough,’ Jacob sniggered as he plucked both assailants up from the floor by the scruff of their necks.

‘Aaaaaaaaah lemmego lemmego lemmego _lemmego!’_

_‘Lemmegotoo!’_

‘Sure,’ Ezekiel said. He scratched the gorilla under its chin, sniggering as it tried to snap at his fingers. ‘We’ll let you go. But we’re gonna have a talk first, and then you guys can show us _exactly_ what you’ve been doing in that storage shed, alright? ‘Cause the cowboy and I’ve been in there earlier and you know. Perhaps you wanna tell us why there’s enough scrap metal lying around in there to build a helicopter?’

\---

Interestingly enough, as it turned out, Ezekiel’s crack about ‘enough metal to build a helicopter’ wasn’t _entirely_ off-base.

‘We just wanted to see the world,’ the lemur called Lemur explained, gesturing towards the collection of metal sheets and parts in the shed. It really was quite impressive; apparently, the toy gang had worked hard over the past six months. If Jacob squinted, he could already make out part of the cabin and in one corner, there was even something that resembled a rotor system. A large table filled with beakers and vials, which fumed ominously, occupied the other side of the shed; ‘for fuel,’ Lemur had explained and then quickly changed the subject.

‘I mean, can you imagine being locked up in the same house, day after day, and you have a lot of books that you can read about all those places that are out there, and you just know you can never go visit them?’ Lemur continued, the squeaky voice taking on a wheedling edge.

‘Sure,’ Jacob said slowly, stepping smartly out of reach of Ezekiel’s elbow. ‘Sure, I can imagine. But let’s take a couple steps back, OK? How’d you… how’d you get…’ he gestured up and down with one hand, ‘how’d you get like this?’

The big orange beast glowered at him. ‘Like what?’

‘I think he means alive, Archibald,’ Lemur muttered. ‘Not fat.’

‘Oh.’

‘Although that’s also a good question.’

‘ _Fuck you.’_

Lemur turned back to Jacob. ‘Ehm. The power of that little child’s love for us?’ he tried, tilting his head and fluttering his eyelashes sweetly.

Jacob snorted. ‘Try again, buddy.’

‘Oh alright.’ Lemur made a face. ‘No fucking clue. We had Mr. Raven think about it, ‘cause he’s the smartest, but even he doesn’t know. It’s just, one day we weren’t like this and the next day, boom. Here we are.’

‘A bit of a shock, to be honest,’ Mr. Raven added. Jacob had to admit he did seem the smartest of the bunch. But then again, given what this bunch consisted of, that was not that much of a feat. ‘And we are not sure if there are… others, like us, out there. That was our second objective in building the helicopter. Mr. Igor and Mr. Bongo merely wanted to see the world, but Mr. Lemur and me are also eager to find out if there are more… others like us. Perhaps if we find others, then we can find out what happened. To us.’

There was a long pause. Then Jacob said, very very slowly: ‘Jones, I think I have an incredibly bad idea.’

Ezekiel’s grin was so wide, it almost split his face in half. ‘Can’t be that bad, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, cowboy.’

\---

As it turned out, letting six sentient stuffed toys with perhaps three brain cells among them (two of which were owned by Mr. Raven) loose in a Library filled with rare books and dangerous magical artifacts, was an _exceptionally_ bad idea.

\---

‘Jones! Status report, where are the gorilla and the other one?’

‘Ah. Well. Eve. You know you’re the best Guardian we’ve ever…’

‘ _Where. Are. They?’_

‘Okay, so there’s good news and bad news.’

‘Oh god.’

‘The bad news is, they’ve discovered the Time Machine Wing.’

‘ _Oh. God._ And the good news?’

‘… I think Stone has already figured out a way to bring them back from the Pleistocene?’

\---

‘Cassandra! Status report on the big orange one?’

‘He’s asleep. And uhm, he’s probably going to sleep for a while. He… he found Demeter’s Horn of Plenty and he has _not_ held himself back. I think the Horn was about to run out, which I didn’t even know it could _do._ ’

‘I’ll take that as ‘down for the count’, then. _Good.’_

\---

‘Jenkins! How are you getting on with getting that Lemur out of your lab? The fumes are getting a bit noxious over here!’

‘Well aware, Colonel. Well aware. But if you could just give me a hand with this battering ram, then I…’

‘ _One. Two. Three. CRASH’_

_‘There_ we go. Get out you little rat, _out!’_

\---

‘Flynn! You found the purple parrot yet? And what the hell is that noise?’

‘Ah, yes. See, that would be Cal. He’s a bit upset, which he would be, because it seems that the purple parrot has hidden itself away. In the rafters of the Library. With the crown and staff of, well. King Arthur.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And what are you not telling me?’

‘Oh. Yes. Right. Ah. He’s. He’s also proclaimed himself King of the Library. Uhm. And we’re all to swear loyalty to him, or be summarily executed.’

‘ _Right.’_

\---

‘Stone, where’s that raven?’

‘Found him an hour ago, he’s in one of the reading nooks. Beak-deep in The Origin of Species, for some reason. I decided to let him be for a bit.’

‘Yeah, that’s probably a good call.’

\---

Finally, after a harrowing afternoon filled with wild gorilla and lemur chases, all five miscreants excluding Mr. Raven, who was still catching up on Darwin, were rounded up in the Annex in front of a very stern looking Eve Baird.

‘Alright, all of you, listen up. Here’s the plan _good god what has my life become._ ’

Four snouts and one beak went up expectantly.

‘We’re making some room for you inside this Library. You can stay here, but there’s going to be a couple of _very strict_ conditions. One.’

‘Wait,’ Lemur broke in, wincing when Eve glared at him. ‘You’re locking us in here? That’s not cool!’

‘ _One.’_ Eve said. ‘You stay in your designated wing. _No. Excursions. Whatsoever._ If you want to see something, use something, borrow something from this Library, you can ask me or Jenkins and then one of us will get it for you. Understood?’

There was a general unenthusiastic muttering on the theme of ‘sure, whatever’.

‘Two. We will try and figure out how you’ve come alive. If you want to help us with that, you’re more than welcome to do so.’

Four snouts and one beak cheered up a little. ‘Okay, yeah,’ Igor said, then sneezed and briefly disappeared into a puff of fossil dust. ‘Yeah, sounds… _achoo…_ sounds good. We’ll help.’

‘And three,’ Eve went on, ‘You see that Back Door over there? _Off. Limits.’_

‘Even if…’ Bongo the gorilla tried, withering away immediately under Eve’s renewed glare. ‘Okay. Yes. Off limits. Sure.’

‘ _If_ you behave, and _if_ you really want to, however,’ Eve added slowly, ‘we _might_ let you use it. Under supervision of any one of us who is not Ezekiel Jones.’

‘Awww, Baird. Come on! That’s not fair!’

‘Yeah, you can talk about fair when Jenkins can get back into his lab without an oxygen mask. All of you. Understood?’

‘Yes, Miss Baird.’

‘Aye aye, Colonel.’

‘That’s not… alright.’ Eve sighed. ‘Well. Stone, Jones, you want to show this gang to their new home?’

‘Sure.’ Jacob stood up from where he’d been leaning against his desk. ‘Come on, guys. Baird, is it okay if we take a detour Nessie’s way?’

‘ _Absolutely not.’_

A chorus of ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwww’ went up as five furry shoulders sagged in disappointment.

‘Okay. But just this once, and if you fall in I’m gonna hang you from the clothesline in the dryer room by your ears until you’ve stopped dripping, got that?’

‘Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!’

The group thundered out of the Annex, Jacob and Ezekiel leading the way. Eve rolled her eyes and turned back towards Jenkins, who had given up on being surprised by life in general and just sat behind his desk, sipping from a cup of tea. ‘God help us all.’

‘Let’s hope so, Colonel. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.’

**Author's Note:**

> That's the fam! There's a Blue Bird as well, but he 'flew out' (was lost) a long long time ago, sniff.


End file.
